


What Passing-Bells

by within_a_dream



Category: Green Men Series - K. J. Charles
Genre: Developing Relationship, Gore, M/M, Pre-Canon, Science Experiments, World War I, lab notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:34:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27203225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/pseuds/within_a_dream
Summary: Notes on the training of Max Isaacs and Hugh Barnaby
Relationships: Hugh Barnaby/Max Isaacs
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Fic In A Box





	What Passing-Bells

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snowshus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowshus/gifts).



Max had no idea what in the everloving fuck was happening, but he hadn’t signed up for this. He hadn’t signed up for the war at all, but when he’d been drafted, he’d prepared to get shot at, to shoot others. Nothing could have prepared him for being ordered off to a ‘new unit’ and waking up in a hospital room with handcuffs on his wrists and symbols glowing on the floor around his bed.

Not glowing like electric lights, glowing like something that lived deep in a cave somewhere and had to make its own light. Max didn’t like the look of that one bit. He felt out the cuffs – no give at all. Not that he’d been expecting to be able to wriggle free, or knew where to go if he _did_ manage to get out, but a man could hope.

The man in the bed next to him was still unconscious, or perhaps sleeping. Not dead, at least; his chest was still rising and falling. Max had never seen him before. He found himself watching him, for lack of anything else to do. The hallway outside of their room was silent, Max had no chance of breaking free, and at least his roommate might know something Max didn’t.

That hope was shattered when the man woke up. “Hullo,” he said, plummy accent still a bit muddled with whatever tranquilizer they must have been given. “I don’t suppose they’ve told you why we’re here?”

Max shook his head. “I was hoping you’d know more than me.”

The man sighed, his face expressing every inch of what Max had been holding inside. “Well, ours not to reason why, I suppose, but I signed on expecting to fight the Krauts, not be whisked away to some secret hospital with no explanation.”

“And _I_ didn’t sign on at all, and here we both are.”

Maybe a bit too acerbic, Max thought a moment too late, but the man laughed. “Here we are indeed. Hugh Barnaby, at your service – my friends call me Barney. I’d offer you a hand to shake, but, well...” He waved his hand as far through the air as he could manage given the handcuffs.

Despite himself, Max liked the man – Barney. “Max Isaacs.”

  
  


_Status Update:_

_Ten subjects selected for trial 003. All show latent thaumaturgic sensitivity which should guard against the rejection seen in previous subjects. The implantation process is unavoidably traumatic, and some subjects will inevitably be lost, but the metaphysical strength shown by the current cohort bodes well for the trial._

  
  


Someone came for Barney the next morning, a strong man wearing a crisp white uniform. He injected both Barney and Max with something before he carted Barney off, more dragging him than making Barney walk. Max tried to stay awake, to listen to where they were going, but whatever they’d given him was far too strong. He spent the rest of the day drifting in and out of consciousness, until two men carted a naked and unconscious Barney back in, slung between them like a sack of flour.

He was pale as death, his hair damp with sweat. The men threw him down on the bed, locking the cuffs back around his wrists and ankles. Given how woozy Max was, he couldn’t be sure, but the metal seemed to glow green as the restraints clicked shut. Barney whimpered.

“Hey!” Max shouted, the word slurring. “You can’t leave him like that! Hey!”

The men didn’t even look back.

Max had seen men die. He’d sat in the trenches and watched while his brothers-in-arms bled out caught on barbed wire in No Mans’ Land. He’d thought he was used to helplessness. But this violence at the hands of his own side, it tore at parts of him he’d thought the war had already extinguished.

Barney didn’t look well. He looked on the edge of death, in all honesty, pale and gasping. Every so often he would shudder violently, and the handcuffs would once again flare green. When Max looked too closely, he could swear he saw something black and writhing snake out from Barney’s torso.

The drugs pulled Max into an unwilling sleep while he was still watching Barney, praying that his chest wouldn’t stop rising and falling.

  
  


_Status Update:_

_Subject Beta took well to the graft. Only time will tell if he will survive the night, but continuous observation was declared unnecessary. This would bring the cohort’s survival rate to three of five._

  
  


Max woke up to Barney screaming. Before he remembered where he was, Max was struggling to get out of bed, the cuffs biting into his wrists. They had to keep quiet, or the Germans would hear them. He had to get to whoever was screaming.

The events of the past few days slowly came back to him, and Max leaned back, looking over at Barney. Some of the color had returned to his face, although his expression was still tight with pain.

Barney’s eyes met his. “Did I wake you?” he asked, and the concern in his voice tugged at Max’s heart.

“Yeah, but I wanted to be woken. You were in bad shape yesterday.”

Barney let out a shaky sigh. “They did something to me, something horrible. It _hurt_ , like nothing else I’ve ever felt, and now it’s _inside_ me, I can feel it winding its way around my guts and trying to force its way out - ” He trailed off into a panicked whimper, fingers digging into the bed.

“You’re all right,” Max said, trying to sound sincere no matter how much he doubted the truth of it. “You’re here, and you’re alive. Breathe.”

No matter how Max felt about his paltry attempts at comfort, it seemed to help Barney, who sunk back down and began to breathe more evenly. “They won’t leave us here. These are official personnel – they can’t just torture and kill British citizens.”

Max couldn’t help but laugh, low and bitter. “You’ve got more faith in the government than me, mate.” But Barney had a point. Max might not be missed by anyone who could make a fuss, but everything about Barney screamed well-off and at least moderately-connected parents. Whoever had chosen them wasn’t picking based on ease of disappearance. They must have some other plan, and reason to believe they could operate without the pesky constraints of the law. “Did they tell you what they wanted?”

“No,” Barney murmured, voice hoarse. He was bone-tired, Max could hear it in his voice.

“You should sleep,” he said. But Barney didn’t answer, and when Max looked over, his head was already lolled back against the mattress.

  
  


_Status Update:_

_Preliminary reaction testing of subject Beta shows thaumaturgic response to stimulus. Subject displays no control over reaction; further training necessary. Stamina is low, but the results are otherwise promising._

  
  


The next day, they carted Barney off again, and when they returned him, they grabbed Max. He did his damndest to fight, but it was one drugged and weakened man against two. They took him to a room with a steel table in the center, a circle scorched into the floor around it. The men dropped Max face-down onto the table, locking cloth restraints around his wrists and ankles. Well, a step up from the metal cuffs, at least.

There were strange symbols etched into the table. Max’s face was too close to read most of them, but even the ones he could see seemed to slide out of his mind the moment he looked away from them. When he looked too long, his head began to ache, like something was chiseling between his eyes into his skull. He squeezed his eyes shut – he hated to do it, but he couldn’t see the men behind him in any case.

Someone traced a finger between his shoulder blades, leaving a cold and sticky residue behind. The finger traced out some sort of pattern, and Max wanted to shrink away from whatever substance was being painted on him. It felt _wrong_ , not just the discomfort of being touched by a stranger but like the substance was burning into him, cold and foreign.

“Are you ready?” a cold voice asked, and another voice assented. Then someone began to chant. The words burned, that same icy cold as whatever the stranger had used to draw on Max’s back. They wormed their way into his ears and wrapped tight around his brain, squeezing and squeezing until he felt he might explode. Then the tearing at his back began. The lines of whatever patterns they’d drawn lit up his nerves like cold fire, and something jagged tore into him, the pain everywhere all at once.

Max screamed.

The cold ripped at him, and the words hammered into his skull, and Max was sure he would die like this. He begged, without really realizing what he was saying, and he cursed the men who had brought him here, and then he just screamed, no words, no meaning.

By all rights, he should have passed out. But whatever had its claws in him was keeping him here, making him feel every moment of the torture they were putting him through. It went on and on and on, until Max was sure he’d be torn apart at the seams.

Then the pain ended, like someone had cut a string. It took several long moments for the buzzing in Max’s ears and the phantom pain in his back to subside. When they did, a more subtle pain worked its way to the front. Something foreign was inside Max. He could feel it winding its icy fingers around his heart, his spine, his guts.

“What did you do?” he begged, voice hoarse and throat raw.

The only response he got was a needle in his arm and a slide back into unconsciousness.

  
  


_Experiment Log 026:_

_Subject Gamma was secured to the prepared altar, and the glyph was drawn onto his back with a mixture of goat’s blood and gallows dirt. [Enclosed is a picture of a man’s back, the center of which is covered in black ink that obscures any glyph that may once have been visible.]_

_The incantation was recited by Dr. [Redacted] Subject took well to the graft, remaining conscious throughout the procedure. Continuous observation deemed unnecessary. Post-procedure, subject was sedated and returned to his room._

When Max awoke, there was something cold and metallic locked around his neck. He reached up to touch it, and only afterwards realized what a change it was that he _could_ reach up to touch it. It seemed they had traded his handcuffs for some sort of collar. What good they thought it would do, he wasn’t sure.

Max stood up, legs weak after who knew how long in bed. As soon as he got his bearings, he headed straight for the door.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Barney said. Max ignored him. He was going to get out of here or die trying.

As soon as he touched the door handle, the collar grew warm, then hot, until he could feel his skin sizzling under it. He fell back, clutching at his neck. As soon as he let go of the door, the pain stopped. His skin was smooth under his fingers, and the collar was once again cool.

“I did warn you.” Barney grimaced sympathetically.

“This isn’t natural.” Panic welled up in Max’s chest, cold and painful.

“I don’t know what the devil they’ve done to us, but you’re right, it isn’t bloody natural.”

He was going to die here. The thought came to Max with all the piercing clarity of a tolling bell. He was going to die here, and they would hide his body and call him missing in action and Max didn’t have much waiting for him back home but that didn’t mean he wanted to be fucking _erased_.

Something erupted in Max’s chest. No, _from_ his chest, a writhing black mass that chilled him to the bone. The _thing_ slammed against the door, moving without any input from him. It dragged across the door, leaving a deep gouge behind. Then the door began to glow, that same eerie green Max had seen on the handcuffs, and his collar began to warm. The thing sizzled, and he could _feel_ it, a horribly hot burn. The mass retracted, pooling back inside him, and he fell to his knees, gasping for breath.

Barney was by his side in an instant, a hand on his arm. He said what Max couldn’t get out through his gasps: “What the _fuck_ was that?”

  
  


_Experiment Log 023:_

_Limb restraints replaced with improved prototype of binding collar. Preliminary observations show great effectiveness in restraining subjects. Thus far, all subjects have ceased the discouraged activities prior to permanent damage._

_[Enclosed is a schematic of a metal collar, symbols clearly marked on the drawing.]_

_Production of each device requires two practitioners, yew kindling, and iron nails. Incantation as follows: [REDACTED]_

  
  


The next day, theircaptors dragged Max to a large room, along with Barney and seemingly every other soldier they’d imprisoned. The room was lined with six men, all pale and afraid with an iron collar locked around their necks.Several of the strongmen were scattered around as well, standing at the ready, and a few more men with far fewer muscles and an air of self-importance about them.

A weedy-looking man with a paper held in his hand stepped forward. “You’ve all been selected to serve an invaluable role in His Majesty’s efforts against the Germans. I’m sure many of you have noticed the changes we’ve imparted upon you. You are now part of an elite occult force, and in the following weeks you’ll be undergoing training so we can deploy you to the front lines. We would like to extend our most sincere gratitude for your service.”

“What the fuck are you playing at?” Max shouted. His collar immediately burned him, and the man waved a hand.

“None of that now,” he said.

“I didn’t sign on for this,” he growled through the pain. “You bastards - ” The pain, bad enough that his vision was graying out, cut him off.

“You’ve been drafted. This is war. Your training begins this afternoon.” With that, the man turned on his heels and strode off, and the thugs stepped in to take hold of all of the soldiers.

  
  


_[A note scrawled in blotted ink on a torn piece of paper – it seems to have slipped between the pages of the more official documents.]_

_Keep an eye on Subject Gamma – this one’s trouble._

  
  


The scientists set them to watching each other’s tests. They had an endless string of those, weights to be lifted and projectiles to be flung and dummies to be crushed. Max was getting a feel for how to make these new parts of his body react, and he wasn’t altogether fond of that. He could unfurl a tentacle with a single thought now, send it flying out in a vaguely accurate direction. Sometimes he sat in his bed and practiced, tracing patterns in the air in the hope that the control would extend to those times when his anger bloomed cold in his chest and the tentacles acted with a mind of their own.

He was fudging the tests, making sure he stumbled in the ways he saw his compatriots stumble. Max didn’t want even more attention on him, but the scientists appeared to be catching on. And while he could fake a fumble when trying to throw a cannonball, he couldn’t put on the symptoms that the others had started to show. Not Barney (he couldn’t bear to think it), but some of the others were pale, or flushed and glassy-eyed with fever. One of them (Carter, he thought?) had stopped being brought out altogether, and sometimes Max could hear him shouting from the sleeping quarters.

Their captors had begun to push harder. Today, one of the men had faltered upon the first of his tasks, and his keeper had shouted for him to keep trying, resorting to activating his collar when the man didn’t obey. Moaning and staggering, he unfurled his tentacles – and they exploded outwards, pulling him in two directions. He was screaming, and then he wasn’t, and there was blood everywhere. Max had _seen_ blood, he’d seen men torn apart by artillery fire and skulls blown open by snipers, but this was something different. The tentacles themselves shrieked as they began to evaporate, leaving behind a man with his spine exposed and bits of him covering the shocked audience. Max reached up to wipe a bit of gore off of his cheek, still staring at the pile of meat that had just a moment ago been a living man.

The scientist, who’d been directly in the blast zone, removed his glasses and made a futile effort to clean them on his jacket. “Get him out of here,” he snapped, and two of the grunts ran to pick the dead man up, carrying him between them out of the room.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Barney murmured, staring after them. Max reached out a hand to him without a second thought, brushing his fingers with a plausible deniability Max had perfected. Barney’s face didn’t change, but he curled his finger around Max’s for a moment.

The scientists made them continue with the day’s tasks, covered in blood and all too aware of what could go wrong.

  
  


  
  


_Status Update:_

_Subject Upsilon dead – catastrophic rejection of the graft. The third to show this particular injury._

_[Photograph enclosed of a shirtless man lying face-down on an autopsy table, his back seemingly flayed apart.]_

_Subject 059167 still showing high fever (40.3°C). Delusions persist, as do uncontrolled attacks on lab attendants and medical officials. As a result, feeding and hydration is difficult – 059167 shows beginning signs of starvation._

_Subjects Beta and Gamma remain promising. Gamma demonstrates full control of the grafts, although remains resistant to cooperation with testing. Beta maintains intermittent control. Neither show signs of the side effects experienced by other subjects._

  
  


  
  


_Experiment Log 057:_

_Subject Gamma has acquiesced to participation after application of negative reinforcement. Succeeded in 3 of 4 challenges, improving on previous results – lost control of grafts after partially completing the 4 th, leading to unconsciousness. _

_**Projectile Distance:** 100 m _

_**Short-Term Capacity:** 525 kg_

_**Long-Term Capacity:** 375 kg_

_**Tension:** Incomplete_

_Subject Beta continues to lag behind Gamma in results, although he did complete all challenges. Distraction may have contributed to poor results, as he asked many times about Gamma during the challenges._

_**Projectile Distance:** 73 m_

_**Short-Term Capacity:** 400 kg_

_**Long-Term Capacity:** 250 kg_

_**Tension:** 103 psi_

  
  


Max and Barney were deployed; just the two of them, there were no others left. Whether this meant that their captors were satisfied with the training or that they had simply run out of time, Max couldn’t say. Whichever was the truth, it left them in the same position – facing down the enemy in someone else’s war, with weapons that were as likely to kill them as kill their opponents. The fighting should have made Max feel something, but all he felt was the chill of the tentacles whirring out of him and the warmth of blood against them as they tore through whatever poor sap happened to be in front of him.

One night, after a particularly messy skirmish, Barney leaned in to wipe the blood from Max’s face, kissing the now-clean skin when he’d finished. And that was something, to have a friend by your side who would wipe the blood from your face. No matter what those bastards did to them, they were together.

One day, no one came to give them breakfast. Or lunch. Or fetch them for training or observation. After a morning and part of an afternoon spent idly waiting, Max took a cautious step towards the door. His collar didn’t heat up. Max crept closer, until his hand was on the doorknob, and the metal around his neck was still cold against his skin. He took a deep breath, bracing himself for pain, and unfurled his tentacles, tearing the door from its hinges.

Nothing. No pain from the collar, and stranger still, no alarm raised in the hallway. In fact, the hall was entirely empty.

“Barney,” Max said, as loud as he dared, “there’s no one here.”

Barney followed out after him, and they ventured down the hall together, Max’s tentacles at the ready. The gymnasium was empty, and the hallway to the outside was unguarded. This must be some sort of test, part of Max said. Another part said that they must have lost the war, and as soon as they stepped outside they’d be apprehended by the Germans. But he couldn’t bear to stay in this place one more minute.

The entryway doors were open, and – there was a man leaning against the doorframe. Tall, lanky, blond, and insufferably rich, and with something in the planes of his face that reminded Max too much of the scientist who’d given them this damned curse to begin with. Max reached out, his tentacle stopping a hairs’ breadth from the man’s throat.

“Who are you?”

The man held up his hands in surrender. “I was hoping not to startle you. Randolph Glyde, at your service. The war’s over, lads, and let me be the first to apologize for what was done to you.”

“What do you know about it?”

The man – Randolph – took a step back, eyeing Max’s tentacle with a mix of sorrow and curiosity. No confusion, no revulsion. “I believe you knew my cousin, Edgar – he’s always been a proper bastard. Well, he’s dead now, and his little project died with him. You’re free to do what you will with your lives.”

Barney stepped forward. “Can you get rid of … ?” He waved his hands in Max’s direction.

“I’m afraid not.” Randolph sighed. “No, that’s old magic, and any attempts to undo it are as likely to kill you as free you. But I can help you learn to control it. If you’re amenable, of course, I wouldn’t dream of holding you against your will. If you find yourselves lacking purpose, however, I have a job offer for you.”


End file.
